Landownership in Korea Under Japanese Rule

I know I said I'd have plenty more to say about Carter Eckert's book on Korea's economic history, and I have every intention of keeping my promise, but in the meantime I've happened upon a most interesting article which not only sheds additional light on one very important aspect of the Korean experience, but ties neatly into much of what Eckert has to say about just what happened to Korean agriculture during the period. From the very first paragraph, the article reinforces a theme which has often been repeated on my blog as well as this one, which is that Korea's actual recent history bears little resemblance to the nationalistic fiction preferred by the majority of Koreans.

FOR STUDENTS of modern Korean history, undoubtedly the most emotionally charged theme is Korea's experience as a Japanese colony during 1910-1945. Everyone agrees that colonialism as a "system" was an unmitigated abomination and Japanese colonialism was a particularly odious variety of it. Many "scholars" therefore tend to hesitate in raising fresh questions. A politically incorrect inquiry or approach or even a familiar question ineptly phrased can prematurely lead to one being branded as an apologist for Japan or defender of imperialism. As a result, within Korea much of the historiography of the colonial period has kept its eyes fixed on familiar and safe questions, all designed to uncover further evidence about how nefarious Japanese rule was from beginning to end and in all its dimensions - political, economic, social and cultural. Often a related quest is the relentless searchlight on those who "betrayed" their country and collaborated with Japan. From this cottage industry "research" monographs with stale and tiresome titles keep pouring into the bookstores. It is not that they always muddy the truth, only that they frequently insist on offering onedimensional visions of reality as fully rounded pictures.

What did I tell you? But now let's get to the real issues of interest:

It has been left largely to Western Koreanists, deeply, even affectionately, interested in the history of the country yet detached enough from the subject of their affection, to ask inconvenient questions and pursue them with rigor and meticulousness. In colonial Korea's economic history, the most significant contribution of this kind was made by Carter Eckert in his ground-breaking study, Off-spring of Empire: The Koe;hang Kms and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945 (University of Washington Press, 1991). Based upon painstaking research he sculpted a three-dimensional image of the symbiotic relationship between Japanese and Korean enterprise that developed under the watchful direction of an authoritarian Japan. In investigating new questions, what Eckert did for illuminating the urban economy of colonial Korea [Edwin H.] Gragert seeks [in "Landownership Under Colonial Rule: Korea's Japanese Experience, 1900-1935"] to do for the rural economy. Gragert has a grassroots focus, involving a microscopic examination of land ownership records in five highly productive agricultural villages. He asks whether the economic deprivation and suffering of the countryside in colonial Korea was produced from the outset by an officially sanctioned confiscation or plunder of Korean agricultural land by Japanese individuals and corporations under a fig leaf of legal forms, as is often alleged, or developed later as a gradual consequence of the introduction of modern legal instruments of credit, purchase and sale into Korean's rural economy and its planned integration into the overall economy of Japan.(emphasis added)

So, wicked Japanese exploiters personally going village to village to drive Korean peasants off their land, or impersonal free-market forces pushing towards consolidation of smaller properties by bigger landowners, which will it be?

He shows compelling evidence for the latter as an answer.

One result of the new market forces operating in Korea was to make conditions in the countryside of both countries subject to the boom and bust cycles of modern, "rational" capitalism. Bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures, forfeitures and sales of property for meeting debt obligations are a regular feature of the "bust" periods everywhere. Thus it was the Great Depression that brought misery to the Korean countryside, just as it did in Japan. Through a very careful scrutiny of both statistical data and anecdotal evidence, Gragert has discovered instances of only market mechanisms playing a role in rural Korea's sad plight. The cadastral survey of 1910-1918 and the use of clear ownership concepts through modern legal deeds were designed to facilitate all contract-based transactions and to produce more precise and predictable sources of state revenue. And similar modern mechanisms for similar purposes were to some extent already a part of the Korean experience under the less-than-fully-carried-out changes brought about by Korean reformers of the 1894-1908 period. Japan thus built new structures upon pre-existing foundations. (emphases added)

A big part of what it means to be a true scholar - rather than a tenured ultranationalist stoking grievances while pretending to scholarship - is the ability to recognize and admit nuances, to live in a world in which things aren't always black and white. As the following passage indicates, Gragert passes this crucial test with flying colors: accepting that Japan annexed Korea for its own selfish purposes does not force one to conclude that only bad things must have come of said annexation, let alone to wildly exaggerate the severity of the bad things that did happen, a notion Korean chauvinists are utterly incapable of appreciating. "You either swallow every crazy claim we make or you're a racist Korean-hater" is an ideology fit only for tribalistic buffoons.

Gragert fully recognizes that plans - dark conspiracies, if you will were indeed hatched in Tokyo to resettle massive numbers of Japanese farmers in Korea through, for instance, the notorious Oriental Development Company in the first years of colonial rule, but parts of the plans had to be watered down and other parts were abandoned under pressure from stiff Korean opposition as well as market conditions. This demonstrates that there were limits to Japan's ruthless railroading. Accommodations had to be made even by the single-minded Japanese rulers. In the end, patterns of land ownership in colonial Korea show a remarkable continuity with the past. Owners sometimes changed but no overwhelming shift took place from Korean to Japanese hands or in land tenure patterns. If new Japanese landowners emerged, so did new Korean ones - and in greater numbers. This remained so even after the severely dislocating effects of the Great Depression. Tenancy rates in rural Korea, for example, rose sharply in the early 1930s and Japanese ownership of Korean land did increase dramatically, but due to market forces at work. Still, in 1935 Japanese individuals and corporations accounted for less than 10 percent of the combined ownership of paddy, upland, and residential land in the villages examined by Gragert.

So many dearly cherished Korean myths demolished in the space of a single paragraph: as Eckert's book also makes extremely clear, all the Korean claims about Japanese "seizure" of land is just so much nonsense, and in fact by far the biggest beneficiaries of Japan's land policies were pre-existing Korean landowners like the Koch'ang Kims and other yangban landlords who grew extremely rich as rice exports to Japan took off. Of course, no one can deny that there was an exploitative aspect to Japanese policies: that is what colonialism is ultimately all about, wherever it occurs, and why it always ought to be condemned, no matter the benefits it may or may not bring.

It is clear from Gragert's account, however, that in the early 1930s while at the micro-level Korean farmers and landowners were subject to sudden fluctuations caused by the depression, at the macro-level the Japanese rulers carefully fine tuned their policies toward Korea to ensure that the adverse effects of the Korean market on Japan's own producers and consumers would be minimized. "The advantage of Korea as an agricultural colony was significant," says the author. `"The spigots of imports could be manipulated, turned on or off as the imperial Japanese economy needed, without regard for the market's actual supply and demand, and the consequences in Korea" (p.138).

And the consequences to many rural Koreans were indeed drastic. Destitute Koreans seeking new sources of livelihood in Manchuria, in Japan itself or elsewhere became a common sight. Although many Japanese followed a similar course, more of them enjoyed the protective umbrella of a paternal government. In the wake of the depression, the Japanese government also shifted its financial resources in Korea from agriculture to industry based on the home country's own new priorities. Thus, the metropole always came before the periphery, showing how precarious Korean agriculture's place in official plans was.

One important thing the above passages do leave out, but which Eckert discusses at some length in his own book, is that many tens of thousands of these destitute Korean farmers went on to take up the Japanese government's sponsorship of subsidized settlement in Manchuria and occupied China, where these same victims now became victimizers exploiting the elevated status afforded them as Japanese citizens to lord it over the Chinese and the native Manchurians: Korean landholdings in these territories were enormous, with those of the biggest magnates like Kim Yonsu amounting to 90,000 acres or more. None of this makes Japan's policies towards the Korean agricultural market acceptable, but it does put a radically less comfortable spin on things than what passes for "truth" in mainstream Korea thinking today.

I leave the final words on Gragert's book to its reviewer, who has the following to say:

This, it seems to me, is true scholarly understanding. It still damns Japanese colonialism's creation of an abjectly dependent Korean agriculture, yet it eschews the noisy breast-beating of Korean nationalist historiography. Gragert's volume is slim but potent in its implications for future research in all aspects of modern Korean economic and social history. One hopes that younger scholars will take up his call to undertake similarly unorthodox and nuanced explorations. (emphasis added)

Given the current intellectual atmosphere in Korea, this hope for "similarly unorthodox and nuanced explorations" will likely long remain a forlorn one, at least where the young scholars in question are Koreans: fairy tales of genocide and mass land theft still seem far more the order of the day than explanations rooted in the market and government-imposed barriers to free trade.